On Dec 4, 2004, at 7:05 PM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Since the AUP specifies dealing with violations off-list, we doesn't really know how sensitive the moderator is, how many warnings it takes to get suspended, whether others posting to a given thread are getting warned, why some apparently off-topic threads never die, etc. This robs us of the ability to tweak the AUP in real time or to verify the moderator(s)' good-faith interpretations match ours.
It is true we do not know how many people have been warned. But we do have a non-trivial sampling of people who have at least claimed to have been warned, and why. And I know about both of my warnings. We also can easily see people who continually post what 90+% of the list would call "off-topic" and clearly have not been banned, and we can easily look up the posting history of, say, Steve & Richard. So, yeah, we don't know how sensitive the moderator is. But we have CLEAR PROOF the moderator is highly subjective in her judgment and AUP enforcement is amazingly inconsistent. I do not believe anyone here would argue either of those points. I also think that makes it nearly impossible to run a good, informative list. Certainly FAR more difficult than just leaving the list completely unmoderated. I do not believe anyone here would argue those points either (besides, obviously, the moderator herself). -- TTFN, patrick